Very few teams in America have the size to compete with Kentucky and their massive front line of future pros.
Texas is one of those teams.
I’m not saying No. 6 Texas (7-0) is going to beat No. 1 Kentucky (7-0) on Friday night in the SEC/Big 12 Challenge in Lexington, but the Longhorns — who I saw twice last week when they won the 2K Classic at Madison Square Garden — do have the size to matchup.
Jonathan Holmes is 6-8, Cameron Ridley and Connor Lammert are 6-9, Prince Ibeh is 6-10 and freshman Myles Turner is 6-11.
Kentucky, of course, has four guys 6-10 or bigger in 6-10 Trey Lyles, 6-11 Karl-Anthony Towns and 7-footers Dakari Johnson and Willie Cauley-Stein.
“We’ve got size,” Texas coach Rick Barnes said Wednesday on a conference call. “They’re big. We’re big. We’re a big team. They’re probably, without [injured point guard] Isaiah [Taylor], they’re probably bigger in the backcourt than us, but across the front line, I mean, it’s probably pretty even across the board there.”
Texas beat reigning national champion UConn on Sunday thanks to a last-second 3-pointer by Holmes, and now they will try and take down the national runner-up Wildcats.
“We got some good players,” Barnes said. “Our guys are going to understand the challenge and I think good players like these type of environments and they get excited about it and we’re going to come play. Right now we don’t have anything scheduled to visit any horse farms or any of that, so we’re coming to play. We are coming to play. And I think John knows our team’s going to come play.”
Barnes spent the majority of the call discussing his friendship with and respect for Kentucky coach John Calipari, whom he called a “dear friend.”
Barnes praised Calipari for getting his players to buy into the platoon system.
“My first thoughts are that John has done just an incredible job with what he’s done to get those guys to totally buy into the team concept,” he said.
He called Calipari not only “underrated,” but “really, really, underrated.”
“I just think he’s been really really underrated as a coach,” Barnes said. “Again, I’ve watched his teams, and you look at his record, people will talk about talent. I don’t think people realize it’s not as easy as you think that when you do have talent, and it’s certainly not as easy as you think when you’ve got a bullet on your back – I mean, a target on your back every night and you’ve got bullets coming at you. So with the entire – when you look at everything, I just think he’s one of the great coaches.”
Barnes said the two have been friends since the late 1970s, and Calipari even speaks well of Barnes on the recruiting trail.
“I’ve recruited against John a lot, and I can tell you this,” Barnes said. “With Myles Turner – and it’s happened numerous times – every time John Calipari has walked into a house prior to us coming in, and we go in, people always ask me, ‘Are you and he close?’ And I say, ‘Why?’ and they say, ‘Well, if you didn’t know better, you’d think he was recruiting for you.’ And I respect that, the fact that he has always said good things about me when we’ve gone into some recruiting situations together. I just wanted to say that, because I just think that, again, John has done a lot of great things for this game.”
Will Kentucky go undefeated like Dan Dakich and others have speculated?
Probably not, but as Bill Self pointed out after his Kansas team was blown out by 32 points in the Champions Classic, it will take a special effort by somebody to take them down.
“There’s so much ahead and teams have a tendency to get better, too,” Self said. “There will be teams out there that can challenge them. Whether they can beat them, I don’t know.”
That’s it. We won’t know if Texas can beat Kentucky until Friday night, but they have one key prerequisite in their size.
Only a few others teams nationally would seem to have similar frontcourt size, with Gonzaga, Duke and Arizona coming to mind.
Still, whatever happens Friday, it’s only early December. There’s a lot of ball to play. And Barnes understands that all too well.
“In a game like this, you got to be playing at a very high level,” He said. “But like I said, we look at this game, we’re not gonna make it bigger than it is. We’re in December and it’s a challenge against – we’re playing the best team in college basketball right now….And yeah, would we love to have Isaiah right now? Absolutely. But we don’t, and they’re not gonna cancel the game because of that. So we got to come play and see what we can do. Compete and bring energy and effort and just compete.”
